Of Two Minds

This video is both compelling and profoundly interesting story of what happens when a mind researcher has a stroke and lives to tell about it. Her talk avoids the strictly medical aspects of the event and focuses on the transcendent experience of the mind shutting down to a near death stage.

Fans of Joseph Campbell, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and similar authors will enjoy this immensely. Biology teachers should make this part of their curriculum.

The Five Second Rule Re-examined

A clever article in the New York Times, The Five-Second Rule Explored, or How Dirty Is That Bologna? by Harold McGee examines the veracity of eating that piece of candy dropped on the floor but rescued by super-human effort before five seconds elapses.

I learned from the Clemson study that the true pioneer of five-second research was Jillian Clarke, a high-school intern at the University of Illinois in 2003. Ms. Clarke conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of the men and 70 percent of the women knew of the five-second rule, and many said they followed it.

She did an experiment by contaminating ceramic tiles with E. coli, placing gummy bears and cookies on the tiles for the statutory five seconds, and then analyzing the foods. They had become contaminated with bacteria.

For performing this first test of the five-second rule, Ms. Clarke was recognized by the Annals of Improbable Research with the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in public health.

It’s not surprising that food dropped onto bacteria would collect some bacteria. But how many? Does it collect more as the seconds tick by? Enough to make you sick?

Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.

Their bacterium of choice was salmonella; the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring and nylon carpet; and the test foods were slices of bread and bologna.

First the researchers measured how long bacteria could survive on the surfaces. They applied salmonella broth in doses of several million bacteria per square centimeter, a number typical of badly contaminated food.

I had thought that most bacteria were sensitive to drying out, but after 24 hours of exposure to the air, thousands of bacteria per square centimeter had survived on the tile and wood, and tens of thousands on the carpet. Hundreds of salmonella were still alive after 28 days.

Professor Dawson and colleagues then placed test food slices onto salmonella-painted surfaces for varying lengths of time, and counted how many live bacteria were transferred to the food.

On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.

What do these numbers tell us about the five-second rule? Quick retrieval does mean fewer bacteria, but it’s no guarantee of safety. True, Jillian Clarke found that the number of bacteria on the floor at the University of Illinois was so low it couldn’t be measured, and the Clemson researchers resorted to extremely high contamination levels for their tests. But even if a floor — or a countertop, or wrapper — carried only a thousandth the number of bacteria applied by the researchers, the piece of food would be likely to pick up several bacteria.

The infectious dose, the smallest number of bacteria that can actually cause illness, is as few as 10 for some salmonellas, fewer than 100 for the deadly strain of E. coli.

Of course we can never know for sure how many harmful microbes there are on any surface. But we know enough now to formulate the five-second rule, version 2.0: If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating.

To Bee or Not To Bee

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” - Albert Einstein

A few days ago, I read an article that raises an alarm about something that must become a top priority for the global community. Our bee populations are under siege and we need to figure out why quickly and reverse the damage or harden the bee population.

Honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate from 24 US states, threatening the production of numerous crops.

The cause of the losses, which range from 30% to more than 70%, is a mystery, but experts are investigating several theories.

American bee colonies have been hit by regional crises before, but keepers say this is the first national crisis.

Bees pollinate more than $14bn (£7bn) worth of US seeds and crops each year, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts.


Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home
David Bradshaw, Beekeeper

The mystery disappearances highlight the important link that honeybees play in the chain that brings fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables.

The crisis threatens numerous crops, from avocados to kiwis and California almonds - one of the most profitable in the US.

"I have never seen anything like it," California beekeeper David Bradshaw, 50, told the New York Times.

"Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home."

Under pressure

With an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear the disorder could prove the breaking point for even large beekeepers.

The bee losses range from 30 to 60% on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70%.

Beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20% in the offseason to be normal.

Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

"The real question is why they leave," Jerry Hayes, a bee expert for the Florida Department of Agriculture told the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.

"Bees are highly social insects. They don't leave their babies and the queen."

The investigators are exploring a range of possibilities to explain the losses, which they are calling "colony collapse disorder". These include viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying pesticides banned in some European countries to see if they are affecting the bees' innate ability to navigate their way back to their hives.

In some cases, bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. This could have lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill them are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many workers.

Read the entire article. This is a non-trivial issue. Our food supply may be in grave danger if this continues.

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History of Head Transplants To Air

This article discusses a National Geographic show that documents secret Cold War experiments that resulted in some very bizarre head transplant experiments. Here's a teaser of what's in the show.

A Soviet hero, Vladimir Demikhov was renowned for his work in the Red Army hospitals during World War II. When peace came, he joined an elite team of Russian doctors ordered by Stalin to beat the West in the field of medicine at any cost. Labouring far from inquisitive eyes in a secret research complex outside Moscow and experimenting freely in his search for new ways of prolonging life, Demikhov was prepared to go where others did not dare.

He believed for example that it was possible to transplant organs like hearts and lungs in human beings. In those days, such a procedure seemed scarcely credible - but Demikhov proved it could be done. Often preferring to work in the dead of night, he showed that the heart and lungs could be taken from one dog and survive in the chest of another.

This laid the groundwork for such landmark operations as the first heart transplant, conducted by South African surgeon Dr Christiaan Barnard, nearly 20 years later. But Demikhov didn't stop there.

He was determined to prove that any human organ could be successfully transplanted, even the brain. To that end, he set about the challenge to create a two-headed dog.

The lights of his laboratory shone into the small hours of that February morning in 1954 as he and his team set about the intricate task of stitching the upper half of the puppy to the larger animal and connecting their blood vessels and windpipes.

As dawn approached, they waited to see if their creation would regain consciousness. Their first sign of success came when the puppy's head woke up and yawned. It was quickly joined by the larger 'natural' head of the mastiff, which gave its new addition a puzzled look and tried to shake it off.

The composite dog was ready to be revealed to the world. Though it had no body of its own, the smaller animal's head was reported to have kept its own personality, remaining as playful as any other puppy, according to Soviet propaganda.

Even the American magazine Time reported the experiment with grudging admiration, describing how the puppy's head alternately growled and snarled with mock ferocity, or licked the hand that caressed it.

"The host-dog was bored by all this but soon became reconciled to the unaccountable puppy that had sprouted out of its neck," their correspondent wrote. "When it got thirsty, the puppy also got thirsty. When the laboratory grew hot, both host-dog and puppy panted to cool off."

After six days, the bizarre hybrid died. But it had survived long enough to worry America, which was desperate to outdo the Soviets in all aspects of science and technology.

The program is called The First Head Transplant: National Geographic Channel, Sunday, January 28, 9pm.

Kids today...

Yeah, we keep hearing about how badly we need scientists and yet I keep reading wonderful stories like this one that make me think that Washington protests too much. Enjoy.

Science project may benefit world's poor
Glenelg student discovers protein in yogurt that kills diarrhea-causing bacterium
By Karen Nitkin
special to the [Baltimore] sun
Originally published February 22, 2006

"I never thought it would come to this," she said.

Her freshman science teacher, Deano Smith, said Fasano was chatty in class and did not always pay attention. "I had a number of talks with her and her parents about working on focus," he said. That's certainly changed, he noted. "It was a matter of feeding the interest, and she stuck with it."

It all started at the Fasano kitchen table. "I'm sitting in my kitchen eating yogurt," she said, and she happened to notice that the container listed an unusual ingredient - lactobacillus. "So I Googled it," she said, "and I was introduced to what are known as probiotics."

For her freshman science project, she obtained - through her father - dishes of E.coli 042, added varying amounts of yogurt, and chronicled the results. The dish with the most yogurt had the least E.coli, so she was able to say that yogurt kills E.coli.

That was enough to win a top prize at both the school and the county science fair, but it wasn't enough to satisfy her curiosity. In Serena's sophomore year, the goal of her science project was to determine precisely what in the yogurt was killing the E.coli.

At that point, she began working with Dr. James Nataro, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland medical school, and with graduate student Nick Morin, who was familiar with lactobacillus.

"He taught me a lot," Fasano said of Morin. "He's not a doctor, and I kind of liked that. It was comfortable. I would ask him questions, and he would laugh at me. It was more laid-back because we were two students."

By the time of the science fair, she was able to state that the lactobacillus in the yogurt was secreting a substance that was toxic to the E.coli 042.